The Condemned Lighthouse
A salt-eaten granite lighthouse on a spit of rock off the coast of Maine at 4:08 PM, where the tide is coming in and a county demolition crew has already drilled sixteen blast holes into the foundation.
The Pemaquid Point Lighthouse — decommissioned in 1987, condemned last March — is scheduled to be imploded at 6:00 PM today. Double has just learned that a marine salvage dealer in Camden will pay $41,000 for the original 1835 fourth-order Fresnel lens still bolted to the lantern room floor, but the demolition foreman says the staircase lost its third-to-last step sometime during Hurricane Lee and the whole structure has been groaning since noon. The tide will cut off road access to the spit by 5:15. They have, generously, sixty-seven minutes.
“That lens survived 188 years of nor'easters — it can survive me walking up some stairs. Forty-one grand is forty-one grand, and I brought a rope.”
“You brought a rope. To a building with sixteen holes drilled in its foundation. The staircase is missing a step and the foreman used the word 'groaning' — buildings don't groan when they're fine, Double.”
Double made it up fourteen steps before the rope anchored to nothing useful, the missing step sent his left leg through a gap like a cartoon trapdoor, and the resulting jolt caused a crack that raced down the granite wall loud enough to be heard from the parking lot. He army-crawled back out at 5:09 with one boot missing, a sprained knee, and zero Fresnel lens — and the lighthouse folded in on itself forty-one minutes ahead of schedule, the demolition crew later admitting the vibration from Double's fall 'did most of the work for us.'
That lens is in the rubble perfectly intact right now, and if they'd give me a backhoe and like two hours I could still close this deal.
He pre-imploded a lighthouse — they should honestly bill him for saving them the dynamite.